Real life has sort of sucked recently and while that hasn’t pushed me out of fandom, it has pushed me more towards the lurking and reading side of things rather than the commenting or writing side of things. On the other hand, Star Wars fandom caught me by surprise and created an immediate craving that was answered by a set of really awesome authors:

Lost Reflections which is theoretically unfinished but doesn't actually feel incomplete, so mostly that just means that there's potential for more sometime if Esama feels inspired to continue.

For the most part, I just wanted to escape from my own head, but then there's Fialleril's amazing stories that are completely gorgeous and do not allow the reader to avoid thinking, but must be read all the more for that. Two of her series, in particular, are must reads:

Anyway, this all leads me to an idea for why the Jedi are the good guys, despite all their deeply questionable activities. However I’m not sure how to turn it into a story, so I’m going to release the idea into pasture and hope it inspires someone else.

The idea is this: Force sensitivity is like food sensitivity, ie, it’s not a good thing.

The Force is the power that holds the universe together and is life itself and all that, right? So, what if some children are just born sensitive to it, and by sensitive, I mean allergic, and the main symptoms are early death and/or raging psychopathy if they survive long enough?

There’s this massive ocean of power that reacts to emotions and most people who can sense it at all, much less manipulate it, drown before they gain any sort of control. The Sith manage to ride the swells and become one with the destruction, whil the Jedi manage to calm themselves enough so that the Force moves through them rather than breaking them.

So while, yes, Force sensitive children are taken away from their families, those families start grieving for that child as soon as they know they’re force sensitive. Acceptance into the Jedi temple is the child’s only chance of survival.

And Jedi knights are those Force sensitives who have mastered the ability to work with and around the Force without become either soulless puppets of entropy or mad power houses suffering constant allergic reactions to life itself. Members of the Jedi agricultural corp are those Force sensitives who can be trusted only under supervision and without the stressors that Jedi knights face.

So as much as the Jedi temple is admired from afar and the Jedi knights are considered celebrity heroes, no family wants to see a Jedi come for their child. But the families are also the ones who call the Jedi temple to come for their children before their children blow up the local preschool or kill a whole community.

And maybe under Palpatine’s propaganda, politicians forgot what sort of refuge the Jedi temples provided for innocent children who were just too dangerous to let live in regular communities, the absence of that refuge is going to have a major impact across the whole Empire.